Pre-Order The First Living Room PC Gaming Console

Xi3's Piston gaming PC, designed specifically for use with your living room television, is available for pre-order right now.

The device will be $999.99 with larger prices if you need more hard drive space, but if you pre-order before the end of the day Sunday, March 9 (tomorrow), you will get $100 off.

This is the first unofficial Steam Box device, developed with Steam's Big Picture mode in mind. Valve is still working on its own hardware, which is still mostly mysterious, but this will be a comparable device.

I didn't think about this before, but the Steamboxes are highly unlikely to be sold under the same model as all the other current consoles--they will not be sold below cost.
Since they are third-party hardware, they are not going to make profits back on revenue of game sales, so they're going to be expensive because they HAVE to be profitable on the hardware.
That said, the price of this reinforces my belief that Steamboxes are going to be priced outside the "comfort" range of regular consumers and the typical console gamer, and they will never have the hardware heft that "elitist" (tech junkie) PC gamers want. The history of the game industry has never been kind to game consoles priced beyond $500, and this thing is twice that.
Never-the-less, I think that there is enough "uniqueness" to the Steambox concept that it COULD pull a Wii, and become some kind of unprecedented success. Frankly, I'd like to see something like this occur, just to upset the current Xbox-Playstation "norm."

Damn, is that tempting. I've been wanting it since the talk about it, but the price really throws me off. I'm not so sure about this any more. Maybe I'll stick with my laptop and the big picture mode after all.

Or you could just wait and purchase both the next xbox 'and' a PS4, rest easy knowing that all major developers will be making games for your consoles and not have to worry about spending more on upgrades for your gaming machine for the next 6+ years.

I'm really intrigued by these "living room" PC's but I'd like to know more. What kind of game control does it support? Do they have dedicated game pads or can use my Xbox controller like a normal PC? Can I also use it as a work station by hooking up a wireless (or wired) mouse and keyboard or is it strictly for gaming? I have a lot more questions so I suppose I better do more research, especially if $999 is the low end model.

I think the most interesting thing about this concept is the fact that it actually exists. It's like they had a good idea, started moving towards it, and stopped halfway. As far as we can tell at this moment, there's no good reason to buy this DerpBox1000.

There is no way I'm gonna pay for a regular souped up gaming PC, so what makes them think I want to pay 1000 dollars for a home PC that won't even equal the power of a regular gaming PC. I just don't comprehend this. I mean I understand they want to reach those who do play on consoles but they do it for price and lack of time and effort to build a gaming PC. I'd rather pay a full time PC because I would probably get more out of it, or, like I plan, buy the next ps4 or xbox. Hell why not both because I will most likely be able to do so for the same price.